Innovator of the Year: Joshua Schachter, 32

Innovator of the Year: Joshua Schachter, 32

The real
magic of folksonomies–and the reason sites like del.icio.us can create
so much value with so little hired labor–is that they require no
effort from users beyond their local work of tagging pages for
themselves. It just happens that the by-product of that work is a very
useful system for organizing information. This distinguishes
del.icio.us from other high-profile Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and
Digg, which people contribute to without reaping any obvious personal
benefit.

Schachter thinks the fact that del.icio.us does not
rely on the selflessness of its users makes it more robust than it
might otherwise be. “Im not a big believer in expecting a large number
of people to act in an altruistic fashion,” he says. “You want to rely
on people to do what they do.” The echoes of Adam Smith are
unmistakable: del.icio.us is a system that, like a healthy market,
turns individual self-interest into collective good.

Del.icio.us
now has more than 300,000 registered users, and it generates as much
traffic in a single day as it did in its entire first year. But even as
tagging has become an industry buzzword that businesses are straining
to associate themselves with, Schachter is confronting the fact that
the vast majority of people on the Web don’t tag at all–and probably
have never even heard of tagging. So how does he expand his sites
audience? “You have to solve a problem that people actually have,”
Schachter says. “But it’s not always a problem that they know they
have, so that’s tricky.” He remains more focused on the site’s value to
the individual than on its folksonomic aspects, because to him, helping
individuals store and recall information is far more important than
classifying the Web. And it may well be individual value that’s most
likely to keep del.icio.us growing.

Regardless of what happens,
Schachter has already shown that out of the seeming chaos of hundreds
of thousands of independent and eccentric judgments, order and wisdom
can emerge. And if you think about del.icio.us in terms of his idea of
making memory scalable, he’s also helped create a rather remarkable
social memory system, in which all of us are able to find more and
better information than we would on our own. As Schachter puts it, “The
one who stashes a page doesn’t have to be the one who ends up recalling
it. Del.icio.us is a storer of one’s own attention. But it also means
you can share it with others.” And that ability will only become more
valuable over time. “The better you understand the world, the better
you’ll do,” Schachter says. “I really think that in the end, more
understanding wins.”